{"id":{"repo_id":"uiuc","oai_identifier":"oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/101068"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/uiuc/oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/101068","repository":{"repo_id":"uiuc","name":"University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign","base_url":"https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh"},"display":{"title":"uAssign: Scalable and flexible interactive activities for teaching the UNIX terminal","abstract":"In this thesis, I describe uAssign, an assignment system for teaching and assessing command line terminal skills. It allows an instructor to create terminal assignments where students complete a sequence of operations to achieve a goal correctly that can be automatically graded. Assignments can be randomized, and are created to an instructor's specification. uAssign provides a friendly user interface to a Docker container via an in-browser terminal emulator powered by WebSockets. Performance testing and its use in an ongoing course show that it is efficient enough to handle a large number of concurrent users. A survey of students shows significant improvement in terminal skill confidence after using uAssign and provides interesting insight into the preferences and opinions of freshman-level students on the subject of their development workflows and terminal experience.","abstract_html":"In this thesis, I describe uAssign, an assignment system for teaching and assessing command line terminal skills. It allows an instructor to create terminal assignments where students complete a sequence of operations to achieve a goal correctly that can be automatically graded. Assignments can be randomized, and are created to an instructor's specification. uAssign provides a friendly user interface to a Docker container via an in-browser terminal emulator powered by WebSockets. 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